


In a Moment

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-03-05
Updated: 2008-03-05
Packaged: 2018-01-25 01:46:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,059
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1625009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Story by turtle lightly</p><p>What Mina experienced in that moment when she first tasted the blood of Dracula.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In a Moment

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Kajivar

 

 

There had been a moment dowsed in eternity when she first tasted her beloved's blood. Her lips were stained with the un-covenant, straining the ties binding her soul with Jonathan's, something so hardly mattering, and easily forgotten. Always blood, she thought as everything in her shifted and changed, the blood of her beloved, or the wine-blood at her marriage. 

Death had fallen away from her then. The tight and suffocating shackles of it loosed from every part of her body and had departed, leaving her feeling wondrously light and light headed, and giddy as if drunk on too much absinthe again. It had been so monstrously heavy, that death-fate that had clamped her in every fiber of her being, though she hadn't even realized its weight before it had been removed.

In that moment, that eternal-forever moment, she and her prince had flown. Away they had gone, from the dark and unfamiliar room, the scratchy sheets, of Dr. Seward's asylum with its screaming and ravening behind the walls, where strange sounds always echoed in one's mind. With the weight of death gone from her she felt like the night air itself. Her prince had taken her hand and shown her the way, stepping delicately on the moonlight and darkness, ever upward, until her lungs filled with the cool, clear air and the reeking scents of below were banished entirely. A thought, a wish, and they had taken flight through the clouds. 

Far away it had seemed, with the native flowers so sturdy and beautiful and the castle she had only imagined, though it had been as real as a true memory. But in that moment of eternity, distance was as nothing, just as death itself had become nothing to her. 

The ground had rushed away and along, and all had been of vapors and intangible space until their feet touched terra firma once more, just in front of the castle itself. 

"My home," her prince had said in his velvet voice. "Your home now. Forever." He had looked upon her with such love and joy. "Come, I must show you it all."

Then, like ghosts, he guided her through all the hallways and doors, each room more beautiful and splendid than the last. The treasures contained within each were beyond imagination. The richness of the fabrics and the wealth of the library were testament to the ages spent in his home. Yet, still she could sense how lonely he had ever been. So many books had never been opened, so many rooms shut up and covered with the dust of the years grown long. On a glass pane of a window in one room, she drew a streak with her finger. How many years of grime, or waiting and despairing, were rubbed away by her touch?

He brought her from the highest turret where she could see the rush of dark water below to the lowest cell, which was so dank and held such vibrations of despair that she should have been frightened, except her prince never left her side and she was nothing but a shade of her former self, with not enough substance to harbor any rough emotions. 

She saw then, the three women. They glided over the floor, their eyes burned with passion and emotions which she could as yet not name. Again, there was no fear in her over them, though she trembled just the same. Her prince wrapped her in his arms, like a shield that could never be breached, and his mouth rained kisses down upon the crown of her head. "My Mina," he whispered to her, and she knew he meant that she was above all others in his heart. Oceans of time, he said he had crossed, with a fathomless, unknowing future always ahead, and despair filling his heart all the days of his existence. 

"At last," said one of the women. Their beauty was sharp and exquisite, each one of them rarer than the other, each one a perfection of womanhood. Their skin was flawless, unblemished, like porcelain, and there-in was such unnatural pallor that their crimson lips nearly glowed. "Our first sister. Come to join us."

The other two flowed to each side of her and then they were pressed upon her, their hands everywhere, their lips so close. Mina gasped, and her prince pulled her backwards and free of them. 

The women fell away, their identical expressions sad and slightly wary. Mina could still not tell them apart. It sounded as if all three spoke as one: "We shall see you again, our first sister. We have so much so share with you. You shall see. When you come again to us, you will know us then."

Her prince was already guiding her away again. The wolves were howling outside the castle now, and she somehow knew that her prince longed to show her the rest of the creatures that comprised his world, his ken. The memory came that she ought to have feared the wolves, their howling and promise of terror, but she felt safe with her prince, and the terror of the wolves was far from her. In her mind, she felt what it was like to move like liquid, to smell the essences of the forest, the strong pine and small heat of prey-animals, and to have a pelt of fur, so protective, so warm. Their howling inspired not anxiety and horror, but appreciation at their mingling voices, the music they raised up into the night sky. 

"Yes," he murmured next to her ear, "so beautiful. And all of this is yours, as it has ever been yours. My dearest--"

His words were swallowed by a storm, the gales of which buffeted her about, and everything rushed away from her too swiftly to see, the ground and sky blurred together, and she lost all sense of what existed or did not. 

The moment of eternity crashed to an end about her, shredding along the seams of reality, and she found her prince gone from her arms. Everything was chaos, men were shouting--men she knew and yet did not know--and Mina could not decipher what had happened, except that she was back again in the grungy little room where her hands held the air and the taste of forever still lingered on her lips. 

 


End file.
